John Hartmann

John Hartmann is an award-winning chess book reviewer, a chess teacher, organizer, and tournament director in Omaha, Nebraska. Currently he writes for Chess Life, the British Chess Magazine, and his own website, Chess Book Reviews, where the above article originally appeared.

John is a coffee aficionado, a weekend baseball player, a Cardiff City supporter, and a soon-to-be father. He also tries, from time to time, to fit in some work on his dissertation in philosophy.

Recent news

12/11/2015 – "You can buy the fanciest GUI," writes John Hartmann, "and you can collect all of the strongest engines around, but if you’re working with poor quality data, your research will suffer for it." He takes a look at the chess databases that are available for ambitious players and takes a special look at the Big and Mega Databases from ChessBase, each currently with 6.46 million games.

6/9/2015 – Currently there are two programs vying for the title of strongest chess engine in the world, and both have seen new releases in recent months. Komodo and Stockfish currently top all computer lists, in that order. But they have different personalities, as John Hartmann shows in his engine review. "Shows" includes both engines simultaneously analyzing in an interesting realtime video.

11/24/2014 – "If you are an ambitious chess player, no matter your age or rating, you
should be using ChessBase," says John
Hartmann, award-winning chess book reviewer, teacher, organizer and tournament
director. He takes a critical look at the latest ChessBase 13, released this
week, describing all the new features he encountered, with screen shots and explanations..

Fritz 16 is looking forward to playing with you, and you’re certain to have a great deal of fun with him too. Tense games and even well-fought victories await you with the “Easy play” and “Assisted analysis” modes.

88 times, IM Oliver Reeh leads you step by step through the most brillant game conclusions of the world champions - in interactive Fritztrainer format, enabling you to enter the winning moves yourself.

What is the trend in the London System? To play with or without Nf3? You can find the answers in the completely new powerbook - based on more than 187 000 games, most of them sourced in the engine room of playchess.